Against Imperialism
From the speech of Senator George F. Hoar, to the Massachusetts Club, July 29, 1898, as reported in Boston Journal.
It is impossible with our eyes on this constantly changing kaleidoscope to predict with certainty how we are to solve the difficult problems that are coming upon us at the end of this war with Spain. But of this you may be sure, that the vote of every person who now has legislative responsibility in either House of Congress, by the choice of the Republicans of Massachusetts, or is likely to have such responsibility hereafter, will be cast in accordance with the opinion of Massachusetts. Her opinion on such questions are the fruit of nearly 300 years of a great and honorable history. She will not depart from the Declaration of Independence. She will not depart from the doctrines of liberty laid down in her own Constitution. She will not consent to be the ruler over vassal States or subject peoples. She will enter upon no mad career of empire in distant seas. She will not seek to force her trade upon unwilling peoples at the cannon's mouth. She will not exact tribute or revenues from men who have no voice in regard to them. She will not consent to enter with the powers of Europe into any partnership, alliance or contest for the plunder of China or the division of Africa, or for the subjugation of eastern archipelagoes, or for compelling unwilling peoples to trade with her. If the American flag appear in the East, it will be as the emblem of their liberty and not of our dominion. She will desire to meet the great responsibilities which the end of this war seems likely to bring to the American people solely in the interests of the provinces we may deliver from Spain and not for our own. The power of the United States is to be exerted through example and influence, and not by force.
It will be a sad thing for the country, it will be a sad thing for mankind, if the people of the United States come to abandon their fundamental doctrine. We are giving it a hard strain in our dealing with the negro at the South. We are giving it a hard strain in our dealing with the great problem of immigration. But it cannot stand if this country undertake also to exercise dominion over conquered islands, over vassal States, over subject races; if in addition to the differences of race and the differences of education we attempt to govern great masses of people, aliens in birth, of strange language, of different religions. If we do it, our spirit will not, I am afraid -- God grant that I may be wrong -- the American spirit will not enter into and possess them, but their spirit will enter into and possess us.
The best thing we could hope in such case is that we shall succeed only as England has succeeded with those of her colonies whom she admits to no considerable self-government. It is much more likely that we may fail as Spain has failed. Let us wait until the Negro throughout the South can cast his vote and have it counted in freedom and in honor. Let us wait until the poor immigrant can come into the northern port and be received as a brother and as an equal, without being used as an instrument to debase the elections in New York or Baltimore or Chicago.
Mr. Gladstone, in his famous comparison of England and the United States, in which he expresses his admiration for our Constitution, says also: "In England inequality lies at the very base of the social structure. Equality combined with liberty was the groundwork of the social creed of the American colonies." An aristocracy or a monarchy may govern subject States. It never was done and never will be done successfully by a democracy or a republic.
Source: Hoar, George F. "The Opinion of Massachusetts on 'Imperialism.'" (Boston: Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence, 1898).
Additional Source: Hoar, George F. "Against Imperialism." Congressional Record, 57th Congress, 1st Session(1902).
The Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Excerpted from Roosevelt's Annual Messages December 6, 1904, and on December 5, 1905.
...It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the law reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies... But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few.
And on December 5, 1905:
... It must be understood that under no circumstances will the United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggression. We desire peace with all the world, but perhaps most of all with the other peoples of the American Continent. There are, of course, limits to the wrongs which any self-respecting nation can endure. It is always possible that wrong actions toward this Nation, or toward citizens of this Nation, in some State unable to keep order among its own people , unable to secure justice from outsiders, and unwilling to do justice to those outsiders who treat it well, may result in our having take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance and when it has become evident that every other resource has been exhausted.
Moreover, we must make it evident that we do not intend to permit the Monroe Doctrine to be used by any nation on this Continent as a shield to protect it from the consequences of its own misdeeds against foreign nations. If a republic to the south of us commits a tort against a foreign nation, such as an outrage against a citizen of that nation, then the Monroe Doctrine does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save to see that the punishment does not assume the form of territorial occupation in any shape. The case is more difficult when it refers to a contractual obligation. Our own Government has always refused to enforce such contractual obligations on behalf of its citizens by an appeal to arms. It is much to be wished that all foreign governments would take the same view. But they do not; and in consequence we are liable at any time to be brought face to face with disagreeable alternatives. On the one hand, this country would certainly decline to go to war to prevent a foreign government from collecting a just debt; on the other hand, it is very inadvisable to permit any foreign power to take possession, even temporarily , of the custom houses of an American Republic in order to enforce the payment of its obligations; for such temporary occupation might turn into a permanent occupation. The only escape from these alternatives may at any time be that we must ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so much as possible of a just obligation shall be paid. It is far better that this country should put through such an arrangement, rather than allow any foreign country to undertake it. To do so insures the defaulting republic from having to pay debt of an improper character under duress, while it also insures honest creditors of the republic from being passed by in the interest of dishonest or grasping creditors. Moreover, for the United States to take such a position offers the only possible way of insuring us against a clash with some foreign power. The position is, therefore, in the interest of peace as well as in the interest of justice. It is of benefit to our people; it is of benefit to foreign peoples; and most of all it is really of benefit to the country concerned...
Source: Roosevelt, Theodore. "The Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine." Annual Message to the United States Congress, December 1904 and December 1905.
Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints
Until the late nineteenth century, U.S. policy regarding immigration remained largely true to George Washington ' s assertion that the "bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respected stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges." The exceptions were the Alien and Sedition acts passed by Congress in 1798 authorizing the refusal of entry or the deportation of people who might endanger the security of the United States. However, these acts lapsed after only two years.
The tremendous influx of immigrants in the mid-eighteenth century, however, made many Americans extremely nervous, particularly when large groups began to arrive from non-northern European nations. Those Americans concerned about immigration in the mid-nineteenth century worried primarily about competition for jobs and resources and moral and political corruption from people whose' religious and personal values were extremely different from those of the mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) who peopled the United States. Movements of various kinds attempted to restrict the opportunities of immigrants and even to get Congress to restrict or eliminate their entrance to the country. In 1875 those concerned about the evils they associated with immigrants were able to get the first restrictive legislation passed. It prohibited the immigration of convicts and prostitutes. In 1882, Congress further barred "idiots, lunatics, and persons likely to become public charges." More important, in that same year Congress passed the first law discriminating against immigrants on the basis of their race. They forbade the further immigration of Chinese laborers.
Americans had tolerated the Chinese, who first arrived at the time of the Gold Rush, as long as they were only a small number of alien workers. But when it appeared that their numbers were increasing rapidly, that they might pose a threat to the jobs and wages of "native" Americans, and that eventually they were going to want the benefits of citizenship, many Americans-particularly in California where the Chinese were settling-began a movement to restrict or even forbid Chinese from entering the United States. Their activism resulted in the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, forbidding the immigration of Chinese laborers to America and forbidding the naturalization of any Chinese.
On the East Coast, Americans objected to the new waves of southern and eastern European and Near Eastern immigrants. Many of these people-Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and others-had dark skins, spoke foreign languages, and were non-Protestant (most were Catholics and Jews). Between 1880 and 1920, nearly 24 million foreigners entered the United States, the majority of them from these "undesirable" groups. The dominant American classes-mainly WASP-were alarmed. They feared that these people would lower wages, corrupt the " American race," and overwhelm American society with their unassimilable foreign ways. People from both the working and the moneyed classes lobbied to restrict the immigration of these undesirables. They first achieved restrictions of certain types of laborers, including European contract laborers and Korean and Japanese workers. They were able to add additional restrictions based on undesirable characteristics, including mental diseases, pauperism, anarchic political philosophies, certain physical diseases, and illiteracy. This last trait was a matter of controversy for more than twenty years, as groups such as the Immigration Restriction League battled to make literacy a requirement for the admission of male immigrants. (Many restrictionists viewed children and females as "accessories" to the more important males, who would be the ones potentially participating in the work force, in politics, and in other important aspects of American life.)
The culmination of the immigration restriction efforts came in 1921 when the first Quota Law was enacted. Like the Chinese Exclusion Act, it restricted immigration based on national origin. While it did not exclude any nationality, it put strict limits on the number of people who could enter the United States from any particular foreign country. Essentially, the quotas were based on a percentage of each nationality's population in the United States in 1910. Once people realized, however, that the great waves of 1890 to 1910 had already allowed large numbers of "undesirables" into the United States, they revised the law with the 1924 National Origins Quota System Act, which based its limitations on the 1890 census. This ensured that the largest number of new immigrants after 1924 would come from the less threatening northern and western European countries.
Since 1924, many other immigration laws have been passed. Notably, a law repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1943, and the National Origins Quota System Act was replaced in 1965. Today, immigration into the United States is largely determined by the 1965 act, which established numerical ceilings for each of the world's hemispheres: 120,000 immigrants are allowed from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere. Although entrance is on a first come, first served basis, the law also established a hierarchy of preferences (relatives, 74 percent; scientists and artists, 1 percent; skilled and unskilled labor, 10 percent; and refugees, 6 percent).
To many people it seems ironic that in America, a nation built on the toil of immigrants, the debate over who should be allowed to populate it remains such a controversial issue. ~
Source: O'Neill, Teresa, ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1992.
From the speech of Senator George F. Hoar, to the Massachusetts Club, July 29, 1898, as reported in Boston Journal.
It is impossible with our eyes on this constantly changing kaleidoscope to predict with certainty how we are to solve the difficult problems that are coming upon us at the end of this war with Spain. But of this you may be sure, that the vote of every person who now has legislative responsibility in either House of Congress, by the choice of the Republicans of Massachusetts, or is likely to have such responsibility hereafter, will be cast in accordance with the opinion of Massachusetts. Her opinion on such questions are the fruit of nearly 300 years of a great and honorable history. She will not depart from the Declaration of Independence. She will not depart from the doctrines of liberty laid down in her own Constitution. She will not consent to be the ruler over vassal States or subject peoples. She will enter upon no mad career of empire in distant seas. She will not seek to force her trade upon unwilling peoples at the cannon's mouth. She will not exact tribute or revenues from men who have no voice in regard to them. She will not consent to enter with the powers of Europe into any partnership, alliance or contest for the plunder of China or the division of Africa, or for the subjugation of eastern archipelagoes, or for compelling unwilling peoples to trade with her. If the American flag appear in the East, it will be as the emblem of their liberty and not of our dominion. She will desire to meet the great responsibilities which the end of this war seems likely to bring to the American people solely in the interests of the provinces we may deliver from Spain and not for our own. The power of the United States is to be exerted through example and influence, and not by force.
It will be a sad thing for the country, it will be a sad thing for mankind, if the people of the United States come to abandon their fundamental doctrine. We are giving it a hard strain in our dealing with the negro at the South. We are giving it a hard strain in our dealing with the great problem of immigration. But it cannot stand if this country undertake also to exercise dominion over conquered islands, over vassal States, over subject races; if in addition to the differences of race and the differences of education we attempt to govern great masses of people, aliens in birth, of strange language, of different religions. If we do it, our spirit will not, I am afraid -- God grant that I may be wrong -- the American spirit will not enter into and possess them, but their spirit will enter into and possess us.
The best thing we could hope in such case is that we shall succeed only as England has succeeded with those of her colonies whom she admits to no considerable self-government. It is much more likely that we may fail as Spain has failed. Let us wait until the Negro throughout the South can cast his vote and have it counted in freedom and in honor. Let us wait until the poor immigrant can come into the northern port and be received as a brother and as an equal, without being used as an instrument to debase the elections in New York or Baltimore or Chicago.
Mr. Gladstone, in his famous comparison of England and the United States, in which he expresses his admiration for our Constitution, says also: "In England inequality lies at the very base of the social structure. Equality combined with liberty was the groundwork of the social creed of the American colonies." An aristocracy or a monarchy may govern subject States. It never was done and never will be done successfully by a democracy or a republic.
Source: Hoar, George F. "The Opinion of Massachusetts on 'Imperialism.'" (Boston: Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence, 1898).
Additional Source: Hoar, George F. "Against Imperialism." Congressional Record, 57th Congress, 1st Session(1902).
The Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Excerpted from Roosevelt's Annual Messages December 6, 1904, and on December 5, 1905.
...It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the law reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies... But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few.
And on December 5, 1905:
... It must be understood that under no circumstances will the United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggression. We desire peace with all the world, but perhaps most of all with the other peoples of the American Continent. There are, of course, limits to the wrongs which any self-respecting nation can endure. It is always possible that wrong actions toward this Nation, or toward citizens of this Nation, in some State unable to keep order among its own people , unable to secure justice from outsiders, and unwilling to do justice to those outsiders who treat it well, may result in our having take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance and when it has become evident that every other resource has been exhausted.
Moreover, we must make it evident that we do not intend to permit the Monroe Doctrine to be used by any nation on this Continent as a shield to protect it from the consequences of its own misdeeds against foreign nations. If a republic to the south of us commits a tort against a foreign nation, such as an outrage against a citizen of that nation, then the Monroe Doctrine does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save to see that the punishment does not assume the form of territorial occupation in any shape. The case is more difficult when it refers to a contractual obligation. Our own Government has always refused to enforce such contractual obligations on behalf of its citizens by an appeal to arms. It is much to be wished that all foreign governments would take the same view. But they do not; and in consequence we are liable at any time to be brought face to face with disagreeable alternatives. On the one hand, this country would certainly decline to go to war to prevent a foreign government from collecting a just debt; on the other hand, it is very inadvisable to permit any foreign power to take possession, even temporarily , of the custom houses of an American Republic in order to enforce the payment of its obligations; for such temporary occupation might turn into a permanent occupation. The only escape from these alternatives may at any time be that we must ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so much as possible of a just obligation shall be paid. It is far better that this country should put through such an arrangement, rather than allow any foreign country to undertake it. To do so insures the defaulting republic from having to pay debt of an improper character under duress, while it also insures honest creditors of the republic from being passed by in the interest of dishonest or grasping creditors. Moreover, for the United States to take such a position offers the only possible way of insuring us against a clash with some foreign power. The position is, therefore, in the interest of peace as well as in the interest of justice. It is of benefit to our people; it is of benefit to foreign peoples; and most of all it is really of benefit to the country concerned...
Source: Roosevelt, Theodore. "The Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine." Annual Message to the United States Congress, December 1904 and December 1905.
Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints
Until the late nineteenth century, U.S. policy regarding immigration remained largely true to George Washington ' s assertion that the "bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respected stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges." The exceptions were the Alien and Sedition acts passed by Congress in 1798 authorizing the refusal of entry or the deportation of people who might endanger the security of the United States. However, these acts lapsed after only two years.
The tremendous influx of immigrants in the mid-eighteenth century, however, made many Americans extremely nervous, particularly when large groups began to arrive from non-northern European nations. Those Americans concerned about immigration in the mid-nineteenth century worried primarily about competition for jobs and resources and moral and political corruption from people whose' religious and personal values were extremely different from those of the mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) who peopled the United States. Movements of various kinds attempted to restrict the opportunities of immigrants and even to get Congress to restrict or eliminate their entrance to the country. In 1875 those concerned about the evils they associated with immigrants were able to get the first restrictive legislation passed. It prohibited the immigration of convicts and prostitutes. In 1882, Congress further barred "idiots, lunatics, and persons likely to become public charges." More important, in that same year Congress passed the first law discriminating against immigrants on the basis of their race. They forbade the further immigration of Chinese laborers.
Americans had tolerated the Chinese, who first arrived at the time of the Gold Rush, as long as they were only a small number of alien workers. But when it appeared that their numbers were increasing rapidly, that they might pose a threat to the jobs and wages of "native" Americans, and that eventually they were going to want the benefits of citizenship, many Americans-particularly in California where the Chinese were settling-began a movement to restrict or even forbid Chinese from entering the United States. Their activism resulted in the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, forbidding the immigration of Chinese laborers to America and forbidding the naturalization of any Chinese.
On the East Coast, Americans objected to the new waves of southern and eastern European and Near Eastern immigrants. Many of these people-Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and others-had dark skins, spoke foreign languages, and were non-Protestant (most were Catholics and Jews). Between 1880 and 1920, nearly 24 million foreigners entered the United States, the majority of them from these "undesirable" groups. The dominant American classes-mainly WASP-were alarmed. They feared that these people would lower wages, corrupt the " American race," and overwhelm American society with their unassimilable foreign ways. People from both the working and the moneyed classes lobbied to restrict the immigration of these undesirables. They first achieved restrictions of certain types of laborers, including European contract laborers and Korean and Japanese workers. They were able to add additional restrictions based on undesirable characteristics, including mental diseases, pauperism, anarchic political philosophies, certain physical diseases, and illiteracy. This last trait was a matter of controversy for more than twenty years, as groups such as the Immigration Restriction League battled to make literacy a requirement for the admission of male immigrants. (Many restrictionists viewed children and females as "accessories" to the more important males, who would be the ones potentially participating in the work force, in politics, and in other important aspects of American life.)
The culmination of the immigration restriction efforts came in 1921 when the first Quota Law was enacted. Like the Chinese Exclusion Act, it restricted immigration based on national origin. While it did not exclude any nationality, it put strict limits on the number of people who could enter the United States from any particular foreign country. Essentially, the quotas were based on a percentage of each nationality's population in the United States in 1910. Once people realized, however, that the great waves of 1890 to 1910 had already allowed large numbers of "undesirables" into the United States, they revised the law with the 1924 National Origins Quota System Act, which based its limitations on the 1890 census. This ensured that the largest number of new immigrants after 1924 would come from the less threatening northern and western European countries.
Since 1924, many other immigration laws have been passed. Notably, a law repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1943, and the National Origins Quota System Act was replaced in 1965. Today, immigration into the United States is largely determined by the 1965 act, which established numerical ceilings for each of the world's hemispheres: 120,000 immigrants are allowed from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere. Although entrance is on a first come, first served basis, the law also established a hierarchy of preferences (relatives, 74 percent; scientists and artists, 1 percent; skilled and unskilled labor, 10 percent; and refugees, 6 percent).
To many people it seems ironic that in America, a nation built on the toil of immigrants, the debate over who should be allowed to populate it remains such a controversial issue. ~
Source: O'Neill, Teresa, ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1992.